Broken Heart Art Cards 2.0 • 2017
This collaboration between artist Teresa Flores and I was for the Animating the Archives: The Woman's Building - A Metabolic Studio Special Project in Archiving fellowship. Initially conceived by Teresa Flores, Broken Heart Art Cards 2.0 is an analog-digital reinterpretation of original Womanhouse artist Mary-Linn Hughes’s Broken Heart Art Cards postcard project (1984). Hughes’s original postcards identified “trouble signs” of romantic relationships. We collaborated to reinterpret these for social media to draw parallels between toxic relationships and the institutional gaslighting tactics of Donald Trump in the administration’s immediate actions after the 2017 election. The top of each card also featured an inverse of the second wave feminist phrase to allude to how gaslighting language and public policy are intentionally weaponized in a way that causes intimate, personal, relational and social harm. The cards - like Hughes’s original postcards - were also in print versions created to be mailed.
Along with posters, a Broken Heart Art Cards 2.0 mailing station was installed at the Animating the Archives exhibition at Avenue 50 Studio to encourage people to vent about love and/or politics to allied friends, their congressional representatives, or both by enclosing a card with a handwritten note and a handful of heart glitter in an envelope. The cards were also handed out at political actions that year, including the 2017 Defend DACA March and the 2018 Women’s March.
